British TV comedy has long been home to a special sort of monster: the sort who bullies, demeans and patronises, yet is also small, sad, pitiable. Take Basil Fawlty, the hotelier in Fawlty Towers who grovels before his social superiors and sneers at his inferiors. Or Captain Mainwaring in Dad’s Army, who commands his Home Guard platoon with blustering pomposity yet lives in fear of his wife. Or The Office’s David Brent, the boss whose every utterance is an excruciating tangle of self-importance and dog-like neediness.

But perhaps the smallest, saddest, most pitiable monster of all is Alan Partridge: failed sports reporter, failed chat show host, failed husband, but somehow still utterly convinced of his own brilliance, and bewildered by the world’s inability to recognise it. On Monday, Steve Coogan’s gloriously awful anti-hero returns for the first of two specials on Sky Atlantic: one a guided tour of his beloved Norfolk, the other an interview in which he reflects, somewhat improbably, on how books have shaped his life (and reveals that his favourite character in Dickens is “Mr Tickle”).

Watching these two specials, fans may notice that slight changes have come over Alan: he appears to have gained intellectual pretensions. He theatrically rolls his “r”s. He’s grown an almost foppishly long fringe. From time to time he slips into a toe-curlingly pseudo-genteel tone that the viewer can only imagine is Alan’s idea of “posh”. Evidently we are now in the presence of an Elder Statesman of Broadcasting.

But these developments should come as no surprise, because, unlike most comedy characters, Alan has always evolved (although for a creature this grotesque a better word might be “mutated”). When he first appeared, on Radio 4’s spoof news programme On the Hour in 1991, the writing team that created him – Coogan, Armando Iannucci, Stewart Lee and Richard Herring – meant him merely to be a hapless sports reporter. The joke was that he knew nothing about sport, and had a peculiar fixation with groin injuries. An amusing enough idea, but basic.

His chat show, Knowing Me, Knowing You, introduced us to his arrogance and pettiness. But we weren’t subjected to, as it were, the full Alan until the two series of the sitcom I’m Alan Partridge (BBC Two, 1997 and 2003). Before, we’d been dealing with Partridge the presenter; now we were confronted by Alan the man.

These two series detailed his paltry romantic relationships, his social life (which consisted largely of chatting to the man behind the counter at his nearest 24-hour garage) and his personal problems (“Right, dry skin cream. I’m having an attack of the old flakes again. This morning my pillow looked like a flapjack”).

By now, the character wasn’t simply a send-up of bad TV presenters; it was a send-up of Middle England, or at any rate the male, middle-aged corner of it. Alan was parochial (“Dante’s of Reading: the Ferrari of the coal-effect gas fireplace industry”). He was crass (“That’s one charity I avoid, actually: mental health. Don’t want to get tarred with the mad brush”). He was splendidly naff (his newly built home, he decided, should be called Lord House, Ace House, The Cinnamons or Excalibur Cottage).

Alan’s world is one of Black & Decker Workmates, Lexus saloon cars (plural: “Lexi”), kitchen showrooms, Directors Bitter, fungal foot powder, the music of Wings (“They’re only the band The Beatles could have been!”). He is, in short, the ultimate Embarrassing Dad, but without the cuddly lovability that that tag implies.

The two new specials won’t be the end of him. There will at long last be a film; Iannucci, who has produced and co-written all things Partridge, said this week that writing was well under way, and added, reassuringly, that it’ll be “mostly Norwich-based… it won’t be ‘Alan goes to America’”.

America should be deeply, deeply relieved.

‘Alan Partridge: Welcome to the Places of My Life’ is on Monday on Sky Atlantic at 9.00pm. Alan Partridge on Open Books with Martin Bryce airs the following Monday, July 2